Google Analytics Update and WordPress Beef

July 27, 2007 — smmellott

Well, the latest on my problem accessing blogger.com, google analytics, etc is now fixed. I’m not sure what the problem was, but I closed Firefox and reopened it and everything was OK. I had tried closing all but 1 tab and that didn’t do it. I thought I might have to reboot my PC but fortunately not.

As you may know, I’m trying to decide between Google Blogger and WordPress for my blog. Currently I am updating both and trying to decide which one I want to ultimately go to. So far, in many ways I have been leaning towards WordPress. Part of this is because I like the idea of hosting it myself and I am hoping that when I do, some of the problems will be solved with the additional plug-ins available.

But it is driving me crazy trying to add buttons and whatnot to my WordPress.com blog. I am trying to add a “Digg It” button for Digg. But it seems to be impossible. I have looked and looked and can’t find a reasonable solution. And there are many other ones that won’t work on WordPress, usually because WordPress doesn’t allow Javascript.

And it would not be so bad if it wasn’t almost every single thing I try to do. I do it in Blogger and it is easy. I try in WordPress and it is somewhere between difficult and impossible.

I am still hopeful that if I host my WordPress blog, it will solve alot of these problems. I really hope so because for some reason, I still like WordPress.

October 14, 2006
12:15 am to 12:15 am
12:15 am to 12:15 am
It baffles me why someone would go to the trouble of writing a WordPress plugin but not take the time to write some decent step-by-step documentation for how to install it and make it work. A prime example is a very handy WordPress plugin for adding a digg button to your post. The plugin is written by Aviran Mordo and can be found here. Take a brief look of the comments and you will see that there are more than a few people having trouble implementing this plugin. I was in the same boat and it took me hours to figure out how this plugin was suppose to be implemented. Since no documentation exist, I am writing this to help these who are having problems installing it. Please note that I can only impart on you my experience and I am in no position to answer any technical questions. Those questions should still be directed to the original author of the plugin. Before I begin, I would like to say thanks to Aviran Mordo for writing this plugin. Let’s hope he implements better directions for those who are not php programmers.

Download the plugin.
Upload the plugin to your WordPress plugin folder which is located under wp-content/plugins off your blog’s home folder. I like to put the plugin in a folder called ‘digg’ to keep my plugins organized but you can just put it in the plugin folder.
Go to the WordPress admin page and activate the plugin under the Plugins tab.
At this point, I suggest you submit a post to digg for testing. Having the article already dugg makes it easier to confirm if your installation is working.
I won’t go into how to digg works since you should already know this if you are reading this.
Find the appropriate single.php file in your blog folder. If you are using themes, you will have multiple single.php files. Each will be located under the theme’s folder which is located under /wp-content/themes. If you have not installed any themes, the file will be located under /wp-content/themes/default. Make sure you edit the correct single.php file. The author refers to this action as putting the code in the Loop. Some themes will make a call from the single.php file to another file (ie: theloop.php). If this is the case, you will see something like include (TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/theloop.php’); in the single.php file. If you are using such a theme, you will have to edit theloop.php file instead. The exact location of where to put the code will vary from theme to theme so you’ll have to experiment but it has to be put inside the loop which is often indicated by comments in the file. There will often be clues to where you can put it. Usually below lines that read ‘title’ and above lines that read ‘footer’.
If you want to include the digg this button in WordPress pages files (like this one) in addition to post files, you will need to add the same line of code to the page.php file located in the same folder.
To edit the single.php file, you can download the file using an ftp program and edit it using Wordpad or your favorite text editor. Be sure to make a backup first.
Your first part of your single.php file should look like this. The bold text is the additions. Red text are my comments and should not appear in the file. I had to put the sample single.php file in a separate file due to formatting problems if I put it here. In short, if you want the digg button to appear at the end of the article, enter the code after this section Read more &raquo
The code you enter will vary depending on what you want to appear. Refer back to the author’s site for examples. I used to create the digg button.
Save the file as text and upload it back to the server making sure you put it in the correct folder if you are using themes.
Time for testing. You cannot test this just by refreshing your blog. You must first go to the article in digg.com and click on the link to your article. Doing this will update your link and the button should now appear in your blog as dugg.
If you did everything right, you should see a digg button at the end of your post like the one you see here. If this article was helpful, feel free to digg it!

Hi Mike,
Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to the WordPress.com (wordpress hosted) version of WordPress. You can also host a WordPress blog (from WordPress.org) on your own site and then you can use downloaded things like plug-ins. As you can tell, it’s pretty difficult even with the ability to download and install plug-ins. On regular WordPress.com, it is ridiculous! I have seen it done, but not any really clear instructions and it appears to involve a lot of coding (and hard-coding) that has to be added to each post you want to have people be able to digg. The only person I found that could implement it, did it about twice and then quit because it was too much work.

WordPress does have another way to add it, as I understand, but it only works on posts that have already had a digg, which makes it not very useful.